


all that you can ask

by saffronHeliotrope



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Incest, M/M, Post-Sburb, Stridercest - Freeform, recovering from trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-23
Updated: 2013-09-23
Packaged: 2017-12-27 09:29:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/977166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saffronHeliotrope/pseuds/saffronHeliotrope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the game dumps you on your ass on the thin carpet of your living room and you realize that there are not one but two other groaning human bodies tangled up in the small space between the tv and the futon, not even your incipient universe-restoration migraine can suppress the sudden bubble of elation that threatens to burst your ribcage like a party balloon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all that you can ask

**Author's Note:**

  * For [desertmint](https://archiveofourown.org/users/desertmint/gifts).



> _I know the dog days of the summer_  
>  _have you ten-to-one out-numbered_  
>  _it seems like everybody up and left and they're not coming back_  
>  _the shadow that you're standing on's still here, sometimes that's all that you can ask_  
>  _and your heart's still beating._  
>  -[Josh Ritter](http://youtu.be/6ZNw1s5eD9c)

When the game dumps you on your ass on the thin carpet of your living room and you realize that there are not one but two other groaning human bodies tangled up in the small space between the tv and the futon, not even your incipient universe-restoration migraine can suppress the sudden bubble of elation that threatens to burst your ribcage like a party balloon.

Also, there might be a moment a few seconds later when you accidentally fling yourself at your Bro, and his arms might accidentally come around you and hug you so hard your back pops in three places. The alt-universe Bro-looking kid you’d seen a few times in the crazy race to the end -- and who Sburb in its infinite wisdom saw fit to drop into your living room post-game with all other Strider-related objects -- sees it happen, but he’s a total bro about it and doesn’t say anything.

(Also, it’s possible that you attack-hug him too, hypothetically speaking. He tenses up in surprise when you do it, hands out to his sides, just the way Karkat used to, but then he hugs you back, carefully, like he’s not quite sure how it works. You decide to be a total bro about it too, and you don’t mention it either.)

Bro looks his little clone-self over and then solemnly offers him a fist, and the resulting bunp narrowly avoids creating a coolness singularity and tearing a rift in the fabric of your shiny new universe’s spacetime.

Bro celebrates your and-random-new-little-twin-brother-makes-three situation by ordering three large pizzas with everything and then strifing with you both on the roof until dusk makes it impossible to see. He himself is no worse for the wear considering his three-year vacation from the mortal coil, but you have new moves now which he didn’t teach you, and when you get the drop on him once he flashes you an honest-to-god ear-to-ear grin. Dirk proves himself to be unbelievably fucking bomb with his katana, unsurprisingly. And it turns out that three-person strifes are suddenly a lot more interesting than with two; you can team up two against one, set up ambushes and elaborate fake-outs, suddenly switch sides in devastating but ultimately inevitable sagas of betrayal and revenge.

It’s basically completely awesome.

Bro makes you share your room with Dirk, but you don’t really mind. You make him a bed on the floor of sleeping bags and thin blankets and a sad flat spare pillow. Bro says he’ll go shopping soon for an air mattress or a cot or something. Dirk tells him not to bother; he says he likes sleeping on the floor.

When the room is dark, though, and you’re ninety-five percent of the way asleep, you hear him say, Dave? and your bed dips slightly like he’s got a knee on the edge of the mattress. You don’t tell him to fuck off; you don’t even question it. Karkat used to pull this all the time -- had to be the loudest snarliest little motherfucker all day long, but without fail turned clingy cuddlebug at night. You scoot over and lift the covers up, and Dirk climbs in beside you.

You don’t mind falling asleep to the sound of his breathing, and you secretly kind of love waking up with his limbs all sticky-hot and draped over you, his hair going in all directions and his mouth open like a doofus and drool on his chin. Which is a good thing, because this quickly becomes the routine. Bro never does go shopping for that air mattress, even though you soon discover that thanks to more post-game voodoo all your hard-won boondollars have somehow been translated into actual dollars and you’re now approximately squijillionaires; instead, he oh-so-casually starts trawling Zillow and the real estate listings in the Chronicle, looking for the perfect penthouse from which to begin world domination via smuppets.

It’s two weeks into your post-Sburb life, and while you’re more than happy to play endless rounds of video games and guzzle gallons of apple juice and strife at sunset, you’ve noticed that Dirk seems not unhappy but somehow ill at ease. He hasn’t gotten used to the constant city noise that drifts up to the apartment and he never goes out if he can help it. It’s still a few months until you all have to address the giant elephant turd in the room that is the question of what to do about school. When you make some noises about taking a trip, maybe getting up to the Pacific Northwest to visit John and Jane, he drops his controller and turns to you, mouth flatline as ever, but with the warmth of his happy-hopeful puppydog eyes practically blasting cracks in his shades.

You’ve already burned your way through the red tape at the DMV and gotten your driver’s license, and Bro is surprisingly cool about letting the two of you take the car and disappear for a while. Or maybe not surprisingly; he’s never really been the helicopter parent type, more the here’s a sword, kid, have fun, I’m going to fuck off and make puppets type. So you load up the car and you get out of town. When Houston’s endless suburbs finally give way to scrubby pine hills, then to prairie and steppe, you watch the tension in Dirk’s shoulders loosen by degrees. You roll the windows down, bellow along with the radio, and watch the miles go by.

It’s easy. It’s good. He gets you in a way that completely startles you. John gets you, sure, and it’s always been a little ridiculous how Jade and Rose see right through you. Karkat got you, in his own way. But Dirk doesn’t even have to try. You’re written into each other’s DNA; you read each other down to the molecules. And you like what you find.

He seems to like what he finds, too.

He opens up more and more the farther you go. You have a rap battle that lasts halfway across West Texas. You have an argument that lasts well into New Mexico. You take terrible pictures whenever you stop for breathers, and you let him fuck around with your camera while you drive. You start teaching him how to drive on empty desert roads, which is hilarious because you barely know how yourself. You avoid cities, fuel up on gas and junk food at dusty gas stations, sleep in your tent or just in sleeping bags wherever you find a good spot. Watching the sunset turn the world blue and pink and gold over White Sands, his hand bumps into yours, and without even thinking you loop your pinky finger through his.

The sky is astonishing, the stars terrifying.

Sitting by the side of the Grand Canyon, he tells you haltingly about loneliness, about his little bastion in the middle of the ocean, all his artificial intelligences staring back at him like his own reflection in a fractured mirror. Waiting for the killing drones to drop from the sky, any day, every day. He tells you what he knows about his own bro whom he never met. You think the guy sounds like a genius. He laughs ruefully, and says yeah.

He loves looking at the old paper map and will pore over it endlessly, reading out the ridiculous names of small towns: Snowflake, Tuba City, Wonder Valley, Pahrump. You give a wide margin to Las Vegas and Los Angeles and shoot straight between them instead, making for the California coast. Looking down on the San Andreas Fault from a lookout in Joshua Tree, he tells you about Jake. You let his words run down to silence, then you tell him that Jake sounds like John minus the towering intellect and 1950s-movie-star suaveness. He makes an ugly snort-laugh that doesn’t quite disguise the choke in his throat. Seriously, fuck that guy, you say.

That was the idea, he says. Didn’t quite work out that way.

You finally hit the coast, and the cliffs along Highway One fill you with a joy that is vast and entirely unironic. Dirk takes a picture of you standing on a rock with your arms flung wide, your head thrown back, and you make him promise not to show it to anyone, ever. Later you catch him texting it to Roxy, who will undoubtedly give it to Rose, who will undoubtedly hang it over your head for the rest of your life.

Perched on a turnout high above the crashing waves, you tell him about finding Bro’s body, still and lifeless. How you sat there for hours, how you couldn’t stop staring at his hand in its glove, palm-up, curled and empty. You’ve got Dirk’s hand between yours while you talk. He turns it over and squeezes yours. You tell him how you blustered your way through, all of you blind; you pretended you were on a great adventure quest but really you spent so much of the time really fucking scared and really fucking sad. And the hallways of the meteor were always a little cold, and not quite built for human dimensions, and the corners never met quite right but twisted into strange headache-making angles and it was all you had to look at for three goddamn years, three goddamn frozen fucking wasted years while you watched your almost-sister and your almost-maybe-girlfriend spiral into incoherence. Bike horns in the dark, Jack on your trail, Lord English ahead of you. And you miss Karkat so much. You’ll never talk to him again and you miss him so much.

You talk and talk, until he takes your face between his hands and kisses you silent.

That night in your tent, tucked into a corner of a remote beach with the sound of the waves surrounding you, he peels your shirt from your skin, kisses across your collarbones, tells you that Bro is alive, loves you, always loved you. You roll him over, pull his leg up to wrap around your hips, tell him that the drones will never come for him. He gasps as you rut against him, says that the Condesce is gone, and Karkat will turn the Empire upside-down and remake it in his own image. You crush your mouth to his as his body arches under you, tell him that he’s not alone, never has to be alone again.

You wake to the sound of sea birds. You feel empty as a husk, clean and quiet. You turn your head, and he’s watching you, clear-eyed. You smile. So does he.

You have the continent behind you, the ocean before you, and friends at the end of the road. You’re free.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow-up sequel fic can be found [here](http://saffronheliotrope.tumblr.com/post/81947263778/i-guess-this-could-be-construed-as-asking-for-smut-but) on my tumblr. Link nsfw, Dave/Dirk.


End file.
